Robert Bork dies at 85

Robert Bork, whose failed nomination to the Supreme Court sparked one of the most contentious appointment battles in American history and helped inspire the conservative legal movement, died Wednesday. He was 85.

Bork’s son, Robert H. Bork, Jr., told the AP his father died at the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington of complications from heart ailments.

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Bork's failed SCOTUS confirmation, comments on process

Bork had served as acting Attorney General and as Solicitor General under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. But Bork only became a household name in 1987, when Reagan tried to promote him to the Supreme Court.

Bork’s nomination was fiercely opposed by Democrats, who saw him as a reactionary who would threaten racial progress and eliminate the line between church and state. Defenders pointed out not a single one of Bork’s earlier rulings had been overturned by the court.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) delivered a famous speech on the floor of the Senate, where he portrayed “Robert Bork’s America” as place where there “was no room at the inn for Blacks, and no place in the Constitution for women.” In October 1987, the Senate rejected Bork’s nomination, with 58 Senators voting against. Bork would resign from his judgeship the next year. Justice Anthony Kennedy — today considered the key swing vote on the court — eventual filled the vacancy.

“We would have had a jurisprudence over the past 25 years that would have been much closer to the founders’ intent,” had Bork reached the high court, Edwin Meese III, who was Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, told POLITICO. “This is not to disparage anybody, but the force of his intellect and his scholarship would have had a tremendous impact on the court.”

For example, Meese predicted Obamacare almost certainly would have been overturned in July if Bork was on the bench.

Meese said he counted Bork as a mentor, and that the judge “was one of the country’s greatest legal minds and a great champion of the Constitution.”

The fierce nature of the fight over Bork’s nomination gave rise to the term “Borking,” meaning to vilify a person to prevent his rise to public office, and has become an increasingly common occurrence in Washington since his nomination.

“My name became a verb,” Bork told CNN years after the nomination, “and I regard that as one form of immortality.”

Bork became even more influential in conservative circles after his nomination was defeated, serving as a rallying cry and icon. He worked at two conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute. In 2012, he served as an adviser to GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign on legal issues. (Vice President Joe Biden, who helped defeat Bork’s nomination, attacked Romney for associating with Bork.) In a 1996 book, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline,” he attacked moral relativism and blamed social liberals for the nation’s ills.

“Robert Bork was one of the most influential legal scholars of the past 50 years,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a statement. “His impact on legal thinking in the fields of Antitrust and Constitutional Law was profound and lasting. More important for the final accounting, he was a good man and a loyal citizen. May he rest in peace.”

The vicious, nasty, dishonest, disgusting and evil treatment of this decent man by the sick leftiists, led by the sickest of them all, Ted Kennedy, began the mutual hatred that infests our politics to this day. The ugly face of the insane left was also responsible for the wrong done to Miguel Estrada and many lower-profile conservatives, by the hateful cabal which rules the communist/progressive/socialist party, AKA the democrats.

Honor Bork and his work. A good man whose service we were denied by the sickening evil in the leftist hearts of Kennedy and his fellow demons.

PHEW! Dodged a bullet. Thank God he never became a high court justice. Minorities and women in this country would be even further back than in the 1800's, especially dealing with the issues of civil rights and Roe v Wade, because this loon was to the right of Attila the Hun, feeling that a company could have women steralized if they wanted to keep their jobs. He was also a NASTY, evil piece of work, hateful of all humanity unless it was rich, white, ultra-conservative fascistic male types like himself. NOW the POTUS can shape the court to HIS liking with the appointments he'll be sure to get during his next 4 years in office.

See liberals? If you'd have put this guy on the court, Obama would be able to replace him and tilt the court to the left now.

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Are you kidding me? IF this right-winged loon had been on the court these last 20 or so years, we probably would have not HAD any rights to be voting by now. This man was a regressive, knuckledragging, right-winged fascist. Heck, President Obama would not have BEEN president had this loon been on the court restricting and probably destroying the voting rights of those who disagreed with him or who were women or minority. I'm sorry, but for as right-winged and nasty as Scalia and Thomas ARE, this guy is worse than THEY even are, and that's saying something. Those 2 are no walks in the park, nor are they good people.

More than the creepy beard, all it took was a long look into Bork's eyes to know he was a man without true compassion. To legislate against those who were of a liberal mind or a different sex or a different religious belief is the very point of partisan politics and unacceptable within the Supreme Court. May this educated and, no doubt, fine man, whose positions I would disdain... rest in peace.

Bork opposed 1960's civil rights legislation, the right of married couples to use contraception, thought the Ninth Amendment was vacuous, and believed that the First Amendment protected only political speech and nothing else.

He was a man whose vision was so out of tune with his times that his rejection for the Supreme Court was one of the best things the Senate has done.